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Tag: Safe Spaces

Britain’s Labour Party has now banned TalkRadio host Julia Hartley-Brewer from its conference next year after finding her guilty of making a joke on Twitter about safe spaces.

This is madness.

When I first reported the story for Breitbart a few days ago, I assumed it was a bit of a flier. That is, though it was certainly true that one or two attention-seeking professional victim types had claimed to be offended by Hartley-Brewer’s harmless joke, I never imagined that their pathetic whining would be sanctioned and endorsed by the party that could form Britain’s next government.

But it has.

We’re all pretty used by now to the Safe Space nonsense that takes place on university campus: archaeology students being given trigger warnings that they might have to dig up human bones; English students being warned that Shakespeare may include scenes of sex and violence; sombreros being banned at Mexican parties because of ‘cultural appropriation’; and so on.

Student activists at Manchester University have defaced a large-scale copy of Rudyard Kipling’s poem “If” in their Student Union building and replaced it with a poem by Maya Angelou. Kipling, they claim, is ‘racist’.

Not so long ago, this would have been called by its proper name: vandalism. And the student activists would have been appropriately disciplined.

Today, in pretty much every news report I’ve read on the subject, the students just get free, largely uncritical publicity for their toxic identity politics virtue-signalling.

On Facebook, Liberation and Access Officer at the University of Manchester Students Union Sara Khan, wrote: “A failure to consult students during the process of adding art to the newly renovated SU building resulted in Rudyard Kipling’s work being painted on the first floor last week.

“We, as an exec team, believe that Kipling stands for the opposite of liberation, empowerment, and human rights – the things that we, as an SU, stand for. “Well-known as author of the racist poem ‘The White Man’s Burden’, and a plethora of other work that sought to legitimate the British Empire’s presence in India and de-humanise people of colour, it is deeply inappropriate to promote the work of Kipling in our SU, which is named after prominent South African anti-Apartheid activist, Steve Biko.”

Fatima Abid, the general secretary of Manchester’s SU, added on Twitter: “Today, as a team we removed an imperialist’s work from the walls of our union and replaced them with the words of Maya Angelou- God knows black and brown voices have been written out of history enough, and it’s time we try to reverse that, at the very least in our union.”